Selling condoms.

When strangers ask what I do for a living, I have to resist the urge to blurt out that I am a bartender in a titty bar on Accra Road. Sometimes it feels a bit too much to explain to folks that, (a) I am a public officer, (b) in a "sensitive" department, and (c) that I don't think Ole Lenku is doing a bang up job. But the desire to hide my current bailiwick from the sensitive noses of strangers grows ever stronger as each day brings a new outrage by the men, women and that odious specimen called the politician that serve, if service they give, in the government.

Did you know that Barack Obama is handed a bill each month to cater for his stay at the White House? I did not. No wonder the man looks so frazzled all the time. It is a very big house and it has very old things. The cost of utilities alone must drive Mrs Obama to distraction. Actually, we do not know the details of the bill Mr Obama gets, but it is humbling for the Most Powerful Leader in the Free World to pay for his house and upkeep, isn't it?

Our current occupier of State House, Nairobi, and the frequent user of State Houses and State Lodges around the country, I would bet my last silver dollar, does not receive a bill at the end of the month itemising the costs he has incurred while using the State Houses' and State Lodges' facilities. I bet neither does his deputy who lives in an egregiously, revoltingly expensive pile somewhere near where the settler wazungus still live in divine isolation from the natives. I suspect, without much to go on I admit, that both must receive a "housing allowance" as many of their fellow public servants do. Ponder the irony, dear reader, and wonder no more why I would rather be associated with the depravities of the shadiest strip joint than proudly declare to be a member of the president's public service.

We have been informed, rather grandiosely too, that our "biometric details" will be collected in the name of the Capacity Assessment and Rationalisation Programme Study. One of its sponsors, the chairman of the Transition Authority, was on TV Sunday night, denying through his flop sweat that the "study" had nothing to do with retrenchment, but everything to do with the efficiency and effectiveness of the public service. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, I'm getting a bazooka! We have seen this movie before and it always ends with mass layoffs. This "study" will end up with men and women facing the sack, never mind the overwrought explanations and denials from one and all in positions to know better.

It is a canon of political economic belief that there are certain things that only "government" can do, certain "developments" that are beyond the ken of the private sector simply because the private sector is solely driven by profit motives. So roads and ports and electricity grids and national referral hospitals and railways and national highways and prisons and airports and hydroelectricity dams and forensics laboratories can only be built by a government, preferably the national one. How do you explain, then, that apart from policemen and soldiers, whom we will leave out of this spat, why the national government seems to be employing beancounters and beancounting clerks, even in the Cabinet and not engineers, project managers, construction foremen and the rest of the gangs that actually build the roads and ports and such things?

It is strange for a government that says that only it can undertake the big projects and that it is borrowing money to outsource the construction of these projects mostly to foreigners, without even getting apprenticeships for Kenyans out of all the outsourcing. Kenyans, even in the eyes of their government, are not good enough except for menial tasks that do nothing but breed mediocrity. Mediocrity is evident in the face of the government: public buildings that look as if they were thrown together by a blind man with one arm tied behind his back; or national celebrations characterised by ersatz Stalinist military formations and regurgitated clichéd speeches. So nowadays I feel my resolve failing every time a stranger asks, "So, what do you do for a living?" One day I might lose it and say, "I sell condoms on Accra Road."